1. The Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to information management. More specifically, the present invention relates to methods and systems for providing data indexing as a service to data residing in a computer system.
2. The Relevant Technology
Modern computer systems allow for the interchange of data and resources through network environments. For example, a modern computer network may include a number of interconnected client computers. The computer network may further include resources. Such resources may be, for example and not limited to, file servers for storing data accessible by the clients, print servers for providing access to printers to the clients, and shared stores on client computers for storing data to be made available to other clients and resources on the network.
In this society where many personal and business interactions are data driven, the ability to provide protection, retention, recovery, security, and other services to data have become important features of computer networks. Establishing a system to provide these services can be costly, both in terms of the equipment and applications necessary to perform the services and particularly in terms of the time required to configure and manage the system. As the amount of data stored by a system increases and the storage systems become more complex, the ability to customize the services provided to each data file is of greater importance.
Data indexing is an example of an application that is often used to create a searchable index of the files on a computer system. Data indexing is an “expensive” procedure, in that it consumes time, computational resources, and storage space. Traditionally, when data indexing is performed, the data indexing service is generally performed on all of the data residing on a computer system, hard drive or volume.
The subject matter claimed herein is not limited to embodiments that solve any disadvantages or that operate only in environments such as those described above. Rather, this background is only provided to illustrate one exemplary technology area where some embodiments described herein may be practiced.